Welcome to Part 3 of our Web Traffic Blueprint article series, where we show you how to drive new visitors automatically to your website using WordPress.
In Part One of this article series, we explained why using an expertly configured WordPress website is the key to generating automated web traffic …
(With an expertly configured WordPress website or blog, all you have to do to bring web traffic is post new content on a consistent basis!)
In Part Two, we discussed critical setup decisions. We explained the best way to get started if you don’t have a website yet, how to set everything up if you already have a website, and what to do if your website has been built using WordPress.
(In Part two we show you where to set up a WordPress site on your domain)
In this article, we discuss the configuration phase of the traffic automation process. The focus of this section is to help you understand why an expertly configured site is different. You will also understand how much work needs to be done to make sure that when all is fully configured, traffic will automatically start flowing simply by posting web content on your web site.
WordPress Web Traffic System – Configuration
Being able to attract more visitors to one’s website is often cited by many business owners as one of the greatest challenges they face online. With business getting ever more competitive, it’s worth looking into every advantage available to increase your own competitiveness online.
The ability to automatically generate traffic on demand can provide you with a huge advantage over other competitors. For businesses, having an expertly configured website means having a significant advantage from the word “go”.
Configuration Is The Difference
There is a difference between an expertly configured WordPress site and a website that has been professionally installed and set up by a web-building expert but not necessarily configured to its fullest advantage.
Here’s a simple way to describe the difference:
An expertly configured WordPress website gives you a professional web presence and an automated online business marketing tool!
(An expertly configured site gives you a professional web presence with a built-in automated online business marketing system!)
Not only does a whole lot more work go into building and integrating an automated online business marketing process into your website, but also a special kind of expertise.
Let’s illustrate this with a story.
A Semi-True Story …
All was going just fine in the gizmo assembly factory when everything suddenly ground to a stop.
No one could figure out what happened and so the floor manager decided to call in an expert to try and fix the problem.
Soon afterward, the expert arrived and, without saying a word, immediately went towards the control box. After staring at the wiring diagrams for no more than 5 minutes, the expert then took out a teeny-weeny little hammer from his tool belt and made a very gentle tap near the left-hand edge of the control unit.
Immediately, the assembly line came back to life.
The manager was delighted as he thanked the expert, who left just as quickly as he had arrived.
A couple of days later, the factory manager received a service bill for $5,000.
The manager picked up the phone and called the expert, demanding to know why they were expected to pay such an exorbitant fee for so little time spent delivering such minimal amount of work and then requested an itemized invoice before hanging up.
The next day, an invoice arrived and was placed in the manager’s intray. Upon opening it, this is what he saw:
The number one challenge most businesses face online is driving visitors to their sites.
How much money did the widget factory stand to lose when production stopped functioning and no one on the business had the expertise required to fix it? Did the expert in our story not have the right to ask to be compensated fairly for investing years developing the knowledge and expertise that allowed him to quickly avert a potentially costly crisis?
Similarly, if you could have a WordPress website or blog fully set up so all you ever had to do is publish new content and search engines, social sites and dozens of other web properties would be immediately notified, how much time and money would this save you?
(How much better would your business be if you could automate the process of attracting new visitors to your site?)
While experts often make complex situations and problems look easy, it rarely is that simple or easy.
Expertly configuring a WordPress site involves more than adding some pages with content and configuring a few settings. It also requires knowing where to tap! In other words, knowing things such as:
- Which programs need to be installed to add desired functionalities to your site.
- Which 3rd-party accounts you need to set up and activate to achieve specific outcomes
- Which internal and external settings you need to configure in order to make sure things function as expected, etc.
(Generating new traffic automatically with WordPress is a process that requires expertise)
This part of the WordPress traffic automation system is not so technically difficult, but it’s quite involved and time-consuming. The reason why is because it’s not as easy as installing a piece of software, tweaking some options and settings in your admin area or clicking a couple of buttons … it’s all this and so much more.
Expertly configuring your website is a process that involves your web server, your WordPress site, and a number of external sites and services …
(The configuration phase involves more than just configuring a few settings in WordPress)
If the configuration process were to be flowcharted, it would look like this …
(A simplistic flowchart showing the steps involved in the configuration phase)
Let’s take a better look at these areas.
Server Configuration
We’re not talking here about the process of configuring your web hosting account for website installation purposes (this should have been done during the Setup phase). What we are talking about, is configuring settings in your web server that affect how your website will handle all web traffic …
(During the configuration phase, your server settings need to be checked for handling both good and bad traffic)
Not all web traffic is welcome traffic. Some of the traffic your site may attract will be unwanted traffic like bot spam, malicious threats, brute-force bot attacks, etc.
This aspect of the configuration process, therefore, is all about planning for bad and good traffic and then adjusting settings in your server accordingly. This includes looking at things like server-level spam protection and threat prevention, to configuring domain and email forwarding, setting up htaccess and 404 redirections, etc …
(Have you configured your webhosting settings for handling things like emails, page error redirects, etc?)
After fine-tuning your web server settings and configuring these, the next step of the configuration phase is to set up various external sites and services.
Integration With External Solutions
The purpose of adding external sites is that all of your content should be posted to one central location (your WordPress site) and from there, radiate outwards to other parts of your traffic generation system, or notify traffic-related web properties and services.
After incorporating these external platforms into your setup, content pointing back to your website gets automatically published on these platforms. Your website will receive exposure online, helping you tap into new sources of traffic.
Some sites and services will need to be set up before configuring your site’s settings to help speed up the process and some will need to be done later, during the automation phase.
For example, you will want to set up the following accounts before configuring your WordPress site:
Google Search Console
(Google Webmasters)
Google Webmaster Tools lets you notify Google about your site’s pages, submit XML sitemaps for automatic page indexing, and provides site owners with a range of important information, tools, and diagnostic reports about their website.
Once your account and site data are set up, use this information with web traffic settings in WordPress and other applications.
Google Analytics
(Google Analytics)
Google Analytics lets you improve your website’s results, SEO, marketing campaigns, and more, by tracking all user behaviour, pages visited, keywords searched for, search engine referrers, etc.
Once your Google Analytics account and site data have been set up, account data can be easily integrated with WordPress using plugins and and fed to various other useful applications and reporting tools.
Bing Data And Tools
(Drive more traffic with Bing Webmaster Tools)
Bing Webmaster Tools is similar to Google Search Console. After setting up your account and entering site details with Bing Webmaster Tools, the details can be used to integrate and automate web traffic settings and notifications in WordPress and other applications.
WordPress.com
(WordPress.com)
As discussed in Part Two, WordPress offers both a hosted (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted (WordPress.org) option. We recommended choosing the self-hosted WordPress version if you plan to grow a professional web presence.
WordPress.com (the hosted option), however, provides a number of useful features, which can be accessed by various WordPress plugins. We recommend setting up an account with WordPress.com, therefore, and we’ll explain how to integrate this into your automated traffic generation system in the next installment of this article series.
Social Media Sites
(Syndicate your content automatically to your social media sites and attract new visitors to your site)
You will need your social media and social bookmarking accounts set up before you can configure these as part of your traffic generation system.
Once you have set up and configured everything, you will be able to syndicate your content automatically to your social media and social bookmarking accounts and attract new visitors to your site.
You should have accounts and profiles set up with all the leading social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.
There are loads of social sites you can set up accounts with. You don’t need to create accounts with all of them, just choose those that will work with your setup and/or content syndication tools.
(You can syndicate your content to loads of social sites. Image source ShareThis.com)
Additional Sites, Aggregators, Etc.
There are many new online technology platforms and content aggregators that can act as secondary sources of traffic. Some are free or provide free access levels, and some are more suitable for enterprise-level applications.
For example, here is a content aggregator site that lets you add a feed from your site …
RebelMouse
(RebelMouse – Publishing platform for distributed content)
RebelMouse is a news aggregator for your social profiles and RSS feeds. Your content is displayed in a Pinterest-like format and visitors can follow your own RebelMouse website.
There are various platforms you can incorporate into your web traffic blueprint. Please contact us if you need assistance exploring this area further, or to discuss a strategy to suit your needs.
Once you have configured your server settings and set up accounts with third-party services, it’s time to configure WordPress.
WordPress Site Configuration
The first step in configuring your site for traffic is to ensure that your global settings have been correctly set up.
Let’s go over some key areas.
WordPress – Global Settings
By default, your WordPress dashboard area includes a Settings menu that allows you to set up your site’s global settings …
(WordPress admin menu – Settings)
General Settings
Content entered into fields like Site Title and Tagline affect traffic by influencing your site’s SEO, search listings, etc …
(Settings Menu – General Settings)
Writing
The Writing Settings section contains a powerful and frequently overlooked traffic notification system …
(Settings Menu – Writing Settings)
As described below the Update Services section title,
When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services …
Unless you or your webmaster have purposely chosen to discourage search engines from indexing your site – see next section, then your site will automatically ping the update services entered into the Update Services text area
With an ‘out of the box’ WordPress installation, this section displays only one entry …
(Update Services – A Powerful Traffic Feature Of WordPress)
You can notify dozens of update services automatically …
(WordPress lets you notify dozens of update services automatically!)
Download A Comprehensive List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site!
Click the link below to download a comprehensive list of reliable and authoritative ping services for your WordPress site or blog:
Download A List Of Ping Services For Your WordPress Site
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Note: If you need help setting up the list of ping services on your site, we recommend using a professional web services provider. You can find professional WordPress service providers in our WordPress Services Directory.
Reading Settings
This section affects how your content gets seen by visitors when they visit your home page and blog pages.
The syndication settings in this section can have an influence web traffic. For example, choosing to display the full content vs a summary of your post, affects how your content shows up in RSS feeds and RSS email campaigns, and could impact someone’s choice to explore your content further, and whether or not they will visit your blog to view the rest of the content from excerpts, or read the content in full without the need to click through to your site.
As far as traffic is concerned, however, the most important setting in this section is whether the Search Engine Visibility feature is enabled or not.
Normally, you want to encourage search engines to visit your site. Leaving this box unchecked enables WordPress to automatically notify all the update services you have listed when new posts get published (see Writing Settings above). Unless you have a specific reason to discourage search indexing spiders from visiting your site, leave this box unchecked …
(Settings Menu – Reading Settings Screen)
Discussion
Although the settings in this section are mostly concerned with how users engage with content on your site, you have the option to allow notifications to blogs linked to from your content, and to allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks). This can work for you, but it can also drive bad traffic in the form of SPAM comments …
(Settings Menu – Discussion Settings)
Permalinks
Your Permalink settings allow you to publish posts with search engine-friendly URLs …
(Global Settings – Permalink Settings Screen)
The examples below show some of the ways permalinks can be configured …
(Configuring search-friendly URLS)
To learn more about setting up permalinks in WordPress, go here: Improve Your WordPress SEO Using Permalinks
WP Plugin Settings
The WordPress developer community makes available plugins that can add almost every type of functionality imaginable to your site, including plugins with features that help to improve traffic generation.
Here are some types of plugin categories that affect traffic and plugin examples
WordPress Security Plugins – Blog Defender
Once again, it’s important to configure your website for dealing with both good traffic and bad traffic. No website is completely safe from being attacked.
(Security Plugins help prevent bad traffic from harming your web presence)
Security plugins like Blog Defender help to make your WordPress blog invisible to attacks from hackers and botnets.
More info:
WordPress SEO Plugins – Yoast SEO
WordPress SEO plugins help drive traffic by improving your website’s SEO …
(WordPress Plugins For SEO – Yoast SEO)
Use a powerful plugin like Yoast SEO (previously known as WordPress SEO by Yoast) to improve your SEO. Properly configured, the Yoast SEO plugin not only makes your website easier for search engines like Google to find and index, it also gives you control over how your content is presented to Google’s search results and social media pages, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and GooglePlus.
Social Plugins
Allowing your visitors to easily share your content with others can help boost traffic to your site, especially if you publish great content that adds real value to readers.
(You can easily add social features to your site with free or inexpensive WordPress plugins)
WordPress users can easily add social sharing features to their website using free or inexpensive plugins.
Many social sharing plugins allow you to specify which sites your content can be shared to, embed social buttons into your content, set up custom update notifications, display/hide share counters (e.g. number of shares), etc. Some plugins even allow you to protect content which users can unlock by liking your page.
WP Theme Settings
As well as configuring various plugins, many WordPress themes also include features that can help grow your site’s traffic.
For example, as well as options and settings for configuring design and layout aspects of your site, many themes also include options for improving SEO and site linking structure for better indexing, add tracking snippets, social sharing buttons, etc …
(Many WordPress themes like Graphene (a highly customizable free theme) include built-in traffic optimization features)
With a number of quality themes, adding social sharing buttons to your website is as easy as clicking a few buttons to configure your settings and enable the feature …
(Many WordPress themes have built-in social sharing features)
WordPress Traffic System – Other Important Areas To Configure
Last (but by no means least) in the web traffic configuration process, are the elements that need to be set up outside of the global settings.
These include:
Website Legal Pages
Once again, when preparing your site for an increase in traffic, it’s important to plan not only for both bad and good traffic but also for all the situations that can hurt your business as more and more people start finding and visiting your website.
If you are making money online, you need to make sure that your website is compliant with regulatory agencies.
(Does Your Site Comply With All Legal Requirements?)
If you need help adding compliance pages to WordPress, go here:
Post Categories And Tags
WordPress categories and tags help improve traffic by improving your site’s search optimization.
(Post categories help search engines better organize and index your web pages, which improves traffic.)
As we strongly recommend in this article, your site’s categories and tags should be discussed and set up earlier on, during the Website Planning Stage.
In the configuration phase, you will want to review and make sure that the tags and categories you have set up.
Visitor Site Map
A visitor site map that lists all of your site’s posts and pages is not only a useful navigation tool, it can also help external applications discover more of your website content …
(Site Map – great for site visitors and beneficial for traffic too!)
It’s important to note that an HTML site map and an XML sitemap are different things. HTML site maps are web pages that link to all other content on your site and provide users with a an understandable map of how your content is organized, while XML sitemaps are code that only search engines can understand. Although Google will index your pages just from an XML sitemap (which a plugin like Yoast SEO can provide – see earlier section), making it easier for visitors to find more pages on your site results in increased traffic.
Your Site’s 404 Error Page
When online users enter the wrong URL or click on a hyperlink pointing to a destination on your website that no longer exists, they will typically be greeted with an error – page not found message …
(A 404 Page)
Configuring your 404 page allows you to recover web traffic that may otherwise be lost. …
(Configuring your 404 page allows you to redirect traffic that may otherwise be lost.)
Although a 404 Not Found error page can be set up in your server, there are plugins for WordPress that let you easily configure your 404 page from your WordPress dashboard.
WordPress Traffic Automation Blueprint: Configuration Process – Summary
Once you have your website expertly configured and fully set up, all you need to do to automatically bring traffic is publish content regularly.
The process of expertly configuring a WordPress site, however, is quite involved and elaborate and requires the configuration and integration of a number of different components and web properties …
(Traffic Blueprint – Configuration Phase Checklist)
The knowledge and expertise required to perform this process typically takes some website developers a long time to learn.
Once you have configured your WordPress site, the next step is to automate the process. This step is addressed in the next article in our WordPress Traffic Blueprint series.
This is the end of Part Three
To continue reading about this topic, click on the link below:
This tutorial is part of a comprehensive series of articles designed to help you learn how to grow your business online inexpensively and drive traffic automatically with a WordPress-powered website or blog and proven web marketing methods.
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"If you're new to WordPress, this can stand on its own as a training course and will stay with you as you progress from beginner to advanced and even guru status." - Bruce (Columbus, Ohio)
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